Like it or not, the man was a pioneer in the Martial Arts. To the contrary, He was not immobile, he just did not kick with his rear foot. Nobody has kicked like him since and I'm sure he would clean up on the current kickboxers now. With his Judo background he was a MMA guy back then....

The TKD Sucks Rule

Originally Posted by Errant108

We need Socratic logic back in schools.

Wallace's horrible and popular kicking technique no longer persists in any sport in the USA besides TKD and point fighting. Though Wallace was a Karate instructor who in theory must have had his student base threatened by TKD '88, he never made any discouraging comments about TKD like he did MMA (because TKD is pretty much a 100% endorsement of Wallace.)

I admit it's possible-though-not-likely that the foundation of crap Wallace built for TKD to grow on in the united states was not a significant factor in TKD exploding in popularity in the USA after the 88 olympics. If kickboxing with leg kicks had been well known in the USA before the TKD olympics in 88, I doubt TKD would have exploded in popularity here. Wallace wasn't specifically trying to get leg kicks introduced to kickboxing, so he obviously didn't care about how important it was, and he did at least try to legitimize the no-legs-USA-kickboxing by claiming his success in the competition gave him some kind of serious credentials.

(Dave Bird of Tae Sho Arnis and Victor Solier of TKD were two who wanted kickboxing with leg kicks in the USA in 88-89, which ironically they got with the popularization of TKD. This IMHO is because martial arts people who didn't want leg kicks could retreat to the sanctuary of sport TKD. As for any "why don't you throw down" comments any other of you have made about TKD, I have two words for you: Victor Solier. I realize that there are exceptions to the "TKD sucks" rule, but these exceptions involve cross training and leg kicks, things not encouraged by participation in sport TKD.)

Dude, Bill Wallace's name is next to unknown outside of America. OLYMPIC TKD. Got that? Wallace never trained it, never contributed to it technically, and his kicking techniques are not taught nor found in Olympic Taekwondo. So, how, in the name of Zeus's butthole, was he an influence on something that he never had contact with, and does not resemble what he did in any way shape or form?

Dude, Bill Wallace's name is next to unknown outside of America. OLYMPIC TKD. Got that? Wallace never trained it, never contributed to it technically, and his kicking techniques are not taught nor found in Olympic Taekwondo. So, how, in the name of Zeus's butthole, was he an influence on something that he never had contact with, and does not resemble what he did in any way shape or form?

read as: Wallace may have influenced American TKD, but he didn't do anything to influence SPORT (aka OLYMPIC) TKD.

The only TKD Wallace would have had any noticable influence on would be some of the independent American TKD styles, which participate not in Sport TKD, but rather in the same tag fighting point sparring as American krotty schools...which Olympic fighters do not participate in.

Wallace, TKD God

Originally Posted by Errant108

Dude, Bill Wallace's name is next to unknown outside of America. OLYMPIC TKD. Got that? Wallace never trained it, never contributed to it technically, and his kicking techniques are not taught nor found in Olympic Taekwondo. So, how, in the name of Zeus's butthole, was he an influence on something that he never had contact with, and does not resemble what he did in any way shape or form?

Yeah, we all know no one in Korea ever watched a Bruce Lee movie before.

"Is" isn't the same thing as "was", and new competition rules are almost always based on existing competition rules of some kind. Where does Olympic TKD come from? TKD. What is TKD? It is a type of Karate. What did non-Kyokushinkai "full contact karate" look like before TKD? No-legs-kickboxing. Olympic TKD COULD have included Leg kicks as was common in international rules kickboxing and Kyokushin competition at the time, or they COULD have done stop-and-go point sparring like most karate systems, BUT they DID do something much more like no-legs Kickboxing instead.

You are ignoring the dates involved. Kickboxing isn't a uniquely Thai martial art, and international rules evolved over a long period of time to allow more and more techniques. When Olympic TKD formed it was going backwords away from the international consensus that Leg kicks should be allowed, in the direction of Wallace. The one date we agree on is 1988, the explosion of sport TKD. Wallace retired from professional kickboxing in the 1980. When Wallace was competing he was competing in the closest thing out there to sport TKD that existed at the time, point fighting and no-leg-kickboxing. Before 1988, there was no clear distinction between TKD and other types of low-quality non-kyokushinkai Karate. When TKD it did distinguish itself into sport TKD, it went solidly in the direction of no-legs-kickboxing popularized by Wallace. (International rules kick boxing had leg kicks by 1988, no-legs-kickboxing was distinctly 'American' at that time.)

Olympic TKD is PROBABLY inspired by a ruleset popularized by Wallace. Olympic TKD IS a sport that justifies Wallace's incredibly horrible kicking strategy by not allowing leg kicks. In the USA (perhaps not internationally) there was a point-fighting strategy built on standing sideways and fencing with the lead foot "proven" in the ring by Wallace, that had become fairly standard throughout the USA's Karate schools. It was this popularity of technique that allowed sport TKD to explode in the USA, because most of the Karate instructors out there had already bought into this "no leg kicks" kicking idea popularized by Wallace.

Is it possible that TKD could have exploded internationally the way it did without funding from USA martial arts consumers? I doubt it.

Actually, BF, I'm not ignoring the dates involved. The Gyorugi ruleset, what became Olympic TKD, dates back to the late 60s. It was always full contact and never invluded leg kicks. It was widely practiced in Korea before Wallace & others even conceived of kickboxing. It never included punches to the head. When Taekwondo was pushed of Olympic status, changed were made like mandatory head gear, & heel kicks were no longer allowed. This was done because knockouts were too common for the IOCs tastes, & deaths were heard of more often than they are today. The push for Olympic status was driven almost entirely by the South Korean military dictatorship & later democracy. The American martial arts consumer, especially at the time, was a miniscule population.